Education has borrowed many ideas from the medical field. Now a new initiative shows the exchange isn’t just a one-way street. Bookmarking, a widely-used method for establishing student proficiency levels in major education tests—such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress—is being adapted to healthcare so patients and their families can better communicate the severity of symptoms. In this blog post Michelle Langer and Ellen Schultz explain this innovative new approach.

At 21, many foster youth “age out” of financial benefits and supports from the child welfare system—before they even finish college. Given the challenges they face, it’s not surprising that only 3 to 10 percent of them earn undergraduate degrees compared with 34 percent of young adults who weren’t in foster care. What can states do to ensure foster youth have the support they need to graduate from college? In this blog post, Patricia Campie provides an overview of the educational challenges foster students face in the transition to college.

Eighty-four percent of foster kids say they want to attend college, but only 20 percent will enroll and, at most, 6 percent will earn a bachelor’s degree. What can be done to help foster youths achieve their educational aspirations? In this blog post, Patricia Campie provides an overview of the educational challenges foster students face and highlights a new program that aims to train foster families to build a college-going culture in their homes.

This long, hot summer could use some good news. And we have it. Teen pregnancy, alcohol and tobacco use by students, children’s exposure to second-hand smoke, motor vehicle-related child deaths, and the rate at which young people are victimized by serious crimes have reached 20-year lows. In this blog post, Frank Rider shares uplifting findings from America’s Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being 2016.

In this second blog post in a series examining educational challenges facing youth in foster care, from early childhood into college, Trish Campie offers some promising solutions to creating pathways to college and career success.

One-third of the 400,000 children in foster care enter the system before age five, just as they should be making the transition from preschool to kindergarten. Seventy-five percent of kids in foster care must change schools, often multiple times, which means they tend to fall behind their classmates, miss more days in school, and experience lower high school graduation rates and less success in college. In this blog post, Patricia Campie offers five research-based ways to bolster school readiness and reduce risks when early entry into foster care disrupts children’s educational opportunities.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives states the authority and flexibility to turn around their lowest performing schools. In this blog post, Allison Gandhi asks if states can succeed where federal policy requirements have run into walls, using the success of the Massachusetts Wraparound Zone initiative as an example.